28.4.10

I've just finished up the colours on page 2 of Rodney Tentakle and, instead of showing you a snippet of the page, I'm putting up the entire thing. I've yet to add text and crop it down to size but the finished article shouldn't be drastically different to what you see here.

First off, for comparison, here are the original inks:

And here are the (pretty much) final colours:

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that the original inks have been edited down quite a bit. The art was a bit too busy in places so I decided to bite the bullet and edit the flack out (not fun) -- if anything, it's taught me to be far more economic with my linework in future.

Anyways, I feel like I'm about to pass out...so I think I'll do just that. G'night all!

4 comments:

A) Hatching generally takes forever to do, thus stealing time from working on other aspects of the comic. B) With hatching, it's so easy to make an image look like crap (either the hatching lines are too sloppy or not evenly-spaced or not straight enough or they're just plain illogical and they're not actually describing any kind of shadow or volume accurately - they're just literally there to cover white space). C) Hatching is basically unnecessary if you're colouring a piece (its purpose is to provide gradations in the black/white values...but if you're colouring the piece, the colours are going to provide those gradations anyway).D) Hatching generally gives an image a more "indy", unpolished and overworked feel. There are a few illustrators (mostly b&w editorial cartoonists) whose hatching I love, but my opinion on the matter has mostly been formed by reading a lot of amateurish crap indy comics who for some reason often gravitate towards that hatched "more-lines-is-better" look moreso than do professional illustrators. Of course, these are all just totally my subjective opinions based on my own personal, unique-to-me experiences with hatching, but yeah, basically: Good for you for removing the hatching. This comic is looking great. ...that being said, I don't think adding in some texture on to those green bushes in the first and last panels would be a bad idea, heh heh...but I'll stop now. You know what you're doing! Good luck!

Well, that came as a pleasant surprise! How're things Conor? Cheers for stopping by!

Yeah, I wish I could say that I got rid of the hatching thanks to my own judgement but when I uploaded those inks a few months back, a fellow Irish artist by the name of Declan Shalvey basically gave me a 'long-story-short' version of your comment. Ty, even mentioned it to me a few times when I was working on a comic in Canada.

Still, though, I'm glad he said it to me because my art became just a tad more refined on the comic as a result.

As I said to Dec, I have this really bad habit of feeling the need to fill in space in my drawings, otherwise it just feels unfinished to me. Luckily, that attitude is gradually falling by the way-side but I must admit that the temptation can still be there to just hatch the crap out of everything. However, that temptation will disappear once I look at my current work and realize that it just looks so much better than if I had have hatched the shit out of it.

As for that bush in the first panel, yeah, I'm definitely going adding some texture to it -- for whatever reason, everything I tried yesterday, it wasn't working and I needed sleep. Bad.

Anyhoo, cheers yet again for stopping by, Conor, I hope we'll be seeing more of you in the coming future!